DistroWatch Weekly

A weekly opinion column and a summary of events from the distribution world

DistroWatch Weekly

DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 193, 12 March 2007

Welcome to this year's 11th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Twenty news announcements on the main page of DistroWatch turned last week into the busiest one so far this year, but things are unlikely to slow down much in the coming days either. The new GNOME 2.18, whose bits and pieces are slowly starting to appear on some mirrors, will be followed by the much awaited Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 later this week, while new development releases from Mandriva Linux (2007.1 RC1) and openSUSE (10.3 alpha 2) are also expected shortly. In other news: How OpenBSD and an old IBM laptop saved a construction project in a Central American jungle, an introduction to Conary - a package management system done right, and a brief comparison between Linux Mint and Freespire - two distributions with similar goals and identical base systems. The feature story of this week's issue looks at the deepening management crisis at Gentoo Linux. Happy reading!

Last week, the Gentoo project entered the lowest point of its 7-year old existence. The single most telling statement attesting to this fact is this brief excerpt from the current issue of Gentoo Weekly News:

The following developers recently joined the Gentoo project:
* Daniel Robbins (drobbins) AMD64 team

The following developers recently left the Gentoo project:
* Daniel Robbins (drobbins)

Yes, this is the same Daniel Robbins who founded Gentoo Linux back in the year 2000 and who left the project in 2004 for personal reasons. He officially re-joined the Gentoo development team two weeks ago - only to resign a few days later. The reason? Strong personal attacks by some of the current developers of the project.

Take this mailing list post by Ciaran McCreesh. Replying to another developer's request to treat Daniel Robbins with respect, he resorted to the following tirade:

What kind of response do you think anyone else would have received had they started repeatedly attacking a project when they didn't even know what that project was, repeatedly tried to interfere with the management of a project when they don't know who is involved with or managing said project, repeatedly posted all kinds of outright lies after having been told that something was untrue and repeatedly resorted to ad hominem attacks in a technical discussion? I'd say that, all things considered, people are showing Daniel an awful lot of respect...

Now, let's review the credentials of Daniel Robbins. After working as a Stampede Linux and FreeBSD developer, he eventually founded his own distribution - Gentoo Linux. By the time he resigned from the project some four years later, Gentoo had become the fastest growing Linux distribution of all times - a much-loved project with a wealth of original ideas, truly comprehensive documentation and excellent package management system. At the same time, Daniel Robbins, an expert kernel and Python hacker, contributed nearly a hundred well-written Linux articles to the IBM developerWorks, including various topics covering the Linux Professional Institute certification exams. Although certainly not without his faults, Daniel Robbins has become one of the best-known personalities the Linux world has ever seen.

Contrast that to the credentials of some of the current Gentoo developers who are so quick to attack the former Chief Architect at every opportunity. Even if they have written useful code that has improved the distribution, they have a very long way to go before they reach the same status as their former benevolent dictator. Furthermore, one has to wonder: with the amount of time some of them spend flaming other people on the various mailing lists and planet blogs, do they actually have any time for coding?

This highlights the complete ineffectiveness of the current power structures at Gentoo Linux. If a person who repeatedly engages in personal attacks against other developers is permitted to remain with the project, then there is something wrong with the way the distribution is managed. Yes, disagreeing with other developers on organisational and technical matters is perfectly fine; launching personal attacks against anybody who has a different idea is not. We see an awful lot of disagreements on the Debian developers' mailing lists as well, but rarely, if ever, we see such staunch personal attacks as we've been seeing on the Gentoo developers' mailing lists.

Talking about Debian, it's worth noting another interesting point. While the Gentoo social contract was loosely modelled on the one written by Debian, the more observant among the readers will notice the lack of any outward statements that would define the goals and priorities of the Gentoo distribution. As an example, the point 4 of the Debian Social Contract clearly states that: "We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities." In contrast, Gentoo has no such clause anywhere in its Gentoo Social Contract and the word "user" is hardly ever mentioned.

Conflicts and disagreements are a natural part of any large and democratic organisation. Ironically, it was Daniel Robbins who first pointed out the dangers of working with "freaks", as he called them, in his article Making the distribution, where he described some of the events that eventually lead to the collapse of Stampede Linux. Many other open source software projects also suffer from large scale flame wars from time to time. However, what distinguishes Gentoo from other such projects is the fact that it doesn't have a mechanism to deal with poisonous individuals. Or to be more precise, the existing mechanism do not work, since the present structures don't have the necessary powers to be effective in solving conflicts. As a result, over the last few years Gentoo Linux has degenerated into a loose structure that is increasingly run by a small, power-hungry clique that resents any attempt to change the current status quo.

As such, Gentoo has become a distribution without any clear goals, without the drive to implement new ideas, and without the ability to deliver products that its users want. Quite a sharp contrast to a few years ago when one couldn't take part in an online distro discussion without somebody coming out with a strong recommendation for Gentoo!

Can anything be done to reverse the situation and to return Gentoo on the path of its former glory? Without the radical overhaul of the Gentoo power structures, it's highly unlikely that anything positive will be done to Gentoo in the near future. With the developer turnover at an all-time high, there is little chance that even the minimum of release and bug-fixing goals will be met. But since the current project leaders are unable to see the rapid downfall of the distribution and unwilling to take any radical measures to reverse the trend, there is little hope for the project. Unless they wake up soon, Gentoo Linux, once the most innovative and refreshing of all distributions, will become nothing more than an average, buggy operating system characterised by endless bickering among the few developers that will bother to remain with it.

While most of the major Linux distributions are in advanced stages of preparations for their upcoming releases, the openSUSE project has barely started its own development cycle (the second alpha release of openSUSE 10.3 is scheduled for release later this week). What can we expect at the end of the long road? Andreas Jaeger, the openSUSE release coordinator, has published a series of slides (in PDF format) highlighting new functionality in the upcoming version. Some of the features that many openSUSE users will appreciate include the ability to integrate external software repositories into the system installer, a new YaST CD-Creator with the ability to build custom add-on CD images, a minimal, single-CD installation system, and improved boot times. Also in the pipeline are various security enhancements, several new YaST modules, and better laptop support. The current plan for openSUSE 10.3 is to ship both KDE 4 (for early adopters) and KDE 3.5.x as an alternative KDE desktop. There is much more, so download the slides to see what you can look forward to in the coming months.

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Where do you use your favourite operating system? If you are like most people then the answer is "at home" or "in the office", but would you consider taking it to a jungle? That's exactly what Philip Munts did: "I recently spent two weeks using OpenBSD in a jungle village in Guatemala. I came with a group of 52 to help finish building a new Church of the Nazarene in La Esperanza Chilatz, few miles outside of Coban. We also planned to operate medical and dental clinics, and teach a number of workshops on various topics ranging from small engine repair to puppetry. I didn't have any specific assignment before our arrival, other than to help our group leader with projection equipment." Read more about how one guy's ingenuity and an old ThinkPad running OpenBSD helped make the mission a success.

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The Linux distribution world has seen an emergence of a fair number of packaging formats over the years. A relative newcomer among them is Conary by rPath Linux. The interesting part about Conary is the fact that it was created by a number of high-profile developers with many years of experience building RPM packages at Red Hat, Inc. But how does Conary compare to RPM or other popular package managers? Bruce Byfield has all the answers in his article entitled Conary: An innovative second-generation package manager: "rPath's Conary is a second-generation package manager. Considering that Erik Troan, rPath's CTO and co-founder, was one of the original authors of the RPM package format, some might be tempted to view Conary as an effort to do things right the second time around -- nor is that view far from wrong. In its design, Conary is a streamlined version of dpkg or RPM with Yum in which all the utilities of those package managers are combined in a single command."

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Last week we received an interesting email from Jonathan Brickman, an avid Linux user, who has been trying to find a fast, KDE-based distribution for his older computers. The result? "I have been testing multiple distros on eight- and nine-year old PCs, PII/K6-class machines with 256 MB of RAM, and I have found something startling: out of several, only one runs KDE and other big applications as fast as Windows XP on my standard 850 MHz Duron with 512 MB RAM. This one is Ark Linux. I don't know if this datum should appear anywhere on your site, but I thought you might find it interesting. I am looking forward to Ark on modern hardware, whenever I can afford some!" Are there other readers who have had a positive experience with Ark Linux? And if you have an old box lying around the house, what is your preferred distribution to run on it? Please discuss below.

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Finally, one more item for discussion in this week's forum. Over the past few weeks we have seen a number of positive reviews and comments about Linux Mint, one of the unexpected distro surprises of this year. Although Linux Mint is really just a re-packaged Ubuntu with out-of-the box support for proprietary file formats and some usability enhancements, it seems that this is exactly what many new users look for in a Linux distribution. It also seems that Linux Mint shares its philosophy with Freespire, another distribution with a strong vocal support for convenient Linux computing even if it means taking a few shortcuts on the issue of Free Software. However, unlike Freespire, which has been working on its upcoming version 2.0 since September 2006 just to reach another alpha stage last week, the developers of Linux Mint have already delivered three successful releases.

Linux Mint 2.2 - one of the unexpected surprises of this year (full image size: 545kB, screen resolution: 1280x1024 pixels)

So here are a few questions for the DistroWatch Weekly readers: Have you tried Freespire and Linux Mint? If so, how do you rate them? What do you think makes Linux Mint such a successful project despite its very young age? Is there anything that Linux Mint could improve? Please comment below.

Marcos Guglielmetti has announced the release of Musix GNU+Linux 0.99: "The Musix Project is proud to announce the release of Musix GNU+Linux 0.99, a new version of the 100% Free Software multimedia operating system for artists and general users. This is the most stable and user-friendly version until now. Since version 0.79, Musix GNU+Linux is focused on multimedia content creation and especially on music, that is: music production, audio and video editing, 3D animation, graphic design, image editing and web design. Hundreds of software packages have been updated to the Debian Etch versions. New additions include the midi sequencer Muse and the sequencer and synthesizer SpiralSynthModular." Read the comprehensive release announcement for more information.

The Bluewhite64 project, which produces an unofficial 64-bit edition of Slackware Linux, has released a revised live CD, version 11.0-r1: "I am pleased to announce the first revision for the Bluewhite64 11.0 live CD. This release uses the AuFS (another Unionfs - great stability and features) along the Linux kernel version 2.6.20.1. Also, includes NTFS read/write support (ntfs-3g), Digikam 0.9.0 for digital photo management, slackpkg 2.09 and qtswaret 0.1.5.3 for package management, Amarok 1.4.5, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.2 and much more. Also, with this release, the Lipstik style and theme will become the live CD default theme along with the nuvoX icons theme and Moodin (Engine) boot splash." Read the release announcement and changelog for further details.

EnGarde Secure Linux has been updated to version 3.0.13: "Guardian Digital is happy to announce the release of EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.13. This release includes many updated packages and bug fixes, some feature enhancements to Guardian Digital WebTool and the EnGarde Secure Linux Installer, and a few new features. What's New? A new document, 'A Guided Tour of EnGarde Secure Linux', which takes through installing and configuring some of EnGarde's essential services; there is now a link to the SELinux Audit Monitor directly from the main WebTool Auditing menu; there were several improvements made to the hardware detection subsystem of einstall...." Read the rest of the release announcement for more details.

Trustix Secure Linux 3.0.5 has been released: "The Comodo Trustix team is proud to announce the release of Trustix Secure Linux 3.0.5, an update to the previous 'Tikka Masala'. The new release is named 'Mirch Masala' to describe the new interesting changes associated. This release has its major change from the previous release of 3.0 with the re-introduction of Anaconda as the preferred choice of installer. In addition, most packages have been upgraded to their latest versions upon customer requests. The core updates available are: kernel 2.6.19.7, PostgreSQL 8.2.3, MySQL 5.0.27, CP+ 3.3, Samba 3.0.24." Read the rest of the press release for further details.

Remote-Exploit has announced the release of BackTrack 2.0, SLAX-based live CD with a comprehensive collection of security and forensics tools: "After many months of work, we're finally happy enough with BackTrack to call it v.2.0 Final. New exciting features in BackTrack 2: updated kernel 2.6.20 with several patches; Broadcom-based wireless card support; most wireless drivers are built to support raw packet injection; Metasploit2 and Metasploit3 framework integration; alignment to open standards and frameworks like ISSAF and OSSTMM; re-designed menu structure to assist the novice as well as the professional; Japanese input support - reading and writing in Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji." Read this brief release announcement and visit the distribution's product page for further information.

Yuichiro Nakada has announced the release of Berry Linux 0.79, a Fedora-based, desktop-oriented live CD with support for English and Japanese. What's new? The new Berry is built of top of the Linux kernel 2.6.20 with Symmetric multiprocessing support, ndev/udev and bootsplash patches. The live CD technology is provided by Squashfs 3.2, Unionfs 2.0 and FUSE 2.6.3 with read and write support for SSHFS and NTFS file systems. Among package updates, the distribution's default desktop has been upgraded to KDE 3.5.6, while Firefox now comes in version 1.5.0.10 and Thunderbird is at 1.5.0.9. 3D desktop effects are provided through AIGLX and Beryl 0.2rc1. Also updated were xine-lib (1.1.4), Samba (3.0.24), WINE (0.9.31) and NdisWrapper (1.38). For more information please read the full changelog.

StartCom Enterprise Linux, a distribution built from source RPM packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has been updated to version 4.0.4: "Ahead of a busy spring season and in anticipation of new StartCom Enterprise Linux AS-5 and StartCom MultiMedia Edition ML-6 comes an updated release of the Advanced Server 4 series. The fifth release of this enterprise class operating system is the natural combined continuation of the previously released AS-4 distribution, which includes security updates and minor adjustments. Notable are an updated kernel, security updates for PHP, Firefox and Thunderbird, but also some additions and improvements for smart cards and hardware tokens." Read the complete release announcement for more information.

Denis "Jaromil" Rojo has announced the release of an updated version of the dyne:bolic multimedia live CD: "2.4.1 'Dhoruba' is out. This release fixes various bugs present in 2.4, including docking functionality when booting from CD and running from hard disk. It also features new software, such as DVDStyler to craft DVDs, StreamTuner to browse thousands of Internet radio stations and Bluetooth support. AbiWord has been re-introduced in its latest version, Cinelerra has been updated with graphical interface enhancements and Firefox has been upgraded to 2.0.0.2. Documentation is also expanded: the new dyne:II manual is almost complete and ready for print." Read the full release announcement for more details. A bug-fix dyne:bolic 2.4.2 has been released.

An updated version of the FreeBSD-based m0n0wall firewall has been released: "m0n0wall 1.23 released. m0n0wall 1.23 adds new features to the captive portal, updates all components to the latest versions and contains many fixes and other small improvements. It marks the last general release in the FreeBSD 4.x-based branch of m0n0wall." From the changelog: "Added support for hardware button on WRAP (if pressed during boot, it will trigger a reset to factory defaults); updated PHP to 4.4.6; updated default webGUI SSL certificate." Visit the project's home page to read the release announcement and to learn more about m0n0wall.

Many thanks to all who took their time to post feedback to last week's The future of DistroWatch Weekly. Although I haven't had the time yet to evaluate your opinions and turn them into some sort of a statistical wish list, one thing is clear: there are much more satisfied readers of DistroWatch Weekly than I ever dared to imagine. Perhaps I was misled by a few lone voices of discontent to believe that the publication needed some restructuring, but after reading through your comments, I think it's safe to leave things as they are. I will comment on some of the suggestions in the next issue of DistroWatch Weekly.

There is one thing I want to mention today, however. After publishing last week's issue, it didn't take long before your comments started pouring in from all corners of the word. As you know, the vast majority of them were highly complimentary. And although I suspected that many of you appreciated the work that goes into this web site, I still sat here, reading the comments and feeling completely amazed at the sheer volume of praise and encouragement. Thank you so much for all the kind words! It is a pleasure to have such an appreciative readership!

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New distributions added to database

Karoshi. Karoshi is a free and open source school server operating system based on PCLinuxOS. Karoshi provides a simple graphical interface that allows for quick installation, setup and maintenance of a network.

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New distributions added to waiting list

Epidemic GNU/Linux. Epidemic GNU/Linux is a new Brazilian distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux. It is aimed at novice users with the main goals being easy to obtain, install, use and personalise.

Jedo Linux. Jedo Linux (pronounced jed-o), is a simple, clean Linux distribution that aims to provide a reliable operating system for power users. It's best described as a cross between Linux From Scratch (LFS), Red Hat Linux and Gentoo Linux. It's an original distribution (not built on any existing one), although it tends to lean towards LFS and feels a bit like Red Hat Linux when using it.

Media Exchange. Media Exchange is an MP3 jukebox appliance that allows users to merge music collections, play music and control the player with a browser, organise music, automatically tag music, remove double tracks automatically, download music directly from the artists, share music with friends safely and easily.

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